I say he was ahead of his time because life has a way of cycling - returning to ideas that went before. In the 1950s, before herbal health supplements were popular, Hugo was already a believer in homeopathic cures. He made his own yogurt (or thick milk, as he called it) and tried to go to a natural hot spring for a few days holiday whenever he could. Fortunately western Canada, where he lived, has many mineral hot springs: Radium, Harrison, Banff, to name a few. At the time, I viewed his practices as "quaint" - the remnant of another era - but here we are, 50 years later, buying natural supplements and appreciating the health benefits of natural hot springs! Hugo lived to the ripe old age of 100 - another indication that his lifestyle was a healthy one!
Hugo married my grandmother when he was only 19 years old. She was the 29-year-old widow of his first cousin, Theodore Guhl (or Gohl, as some of our relatives spell it). Hugo's mother and Theodore's mother were sisters.
Theodore and my grandmother, Olga Sell (pronounced and sometimes written Zell) had 3 children (though a number had died in infancy. As my grandmother recounted her story, it seemed to me that every other child survived.) She was expecting yet another child when, at age 27, her husband, a farmer in the Ukraine, contracted typhoid fever and died in 1921. Tragically, my grandmother's only surviving sibling, a brother, died at the same time - they must have both drunk contaminated water. As my grandmother often said, miraculously the children survived!
My grandfather, Theodore Guhl, was a very religious man. He knew he was about to die, and told my grandmother that he sensed that this baby - this unborn child - was going to go with him. Sure enough, the baby, another daughter, did die in infancy.
Death certainly was no stranger to this generation. When I think of all the losses my grandmother had before she was even 30, it boggles my mind!
Left alone with 3 children, the youngest (my mother, Margaret) only 2, another daughter, Lydia age 4, and a son, Erhardt, age 7, she found it impossible to run their farm with no help. So she appealed to her late husband's aunt, Hugo's mother, to get one of her sons to come and help her. One of the middle children, Hugo, was sent for the summer, and - as the story goes - when fall arrived and the work was done, he said, I guess it's time for me to leave, and she replied: Maybe you should just stay and marry me. And he did!
Together they farmed the land until Stalin threatened to take it from them - and from all farmers who owned land at that time - to create communal farms under the communist system.
Fortunately a Russian friend of Hugo's, a peasant farmer, helped him get the proper documentation to immigrate to Canada. They arrived in Halifax on December 13, 1928: Hugo, Olga, Erhardt, Lydia, Margaret, and Theodore, the firstborn son of Hugo and Olga.
I began to understand my grandfather and his generation a little better after reading a book entitled My Russian Yesterdays, by Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896 - 1985) an immigrant to Canada from Russia, around the same age as my grandmother. Although Catherine was Russian Orthodox, and my grandparents retained their German Lutheran religious practices, her descriptions of village life in her childhood remind me so much of my grandfather Hugo's lifestyle.
I discovered Catherine de Hueck Doherty and her writings when I read about Madonna House, a Catholic community she founded in Combermere, Ontario. I was interested in buying her book, Poustinia, so rather than order it online, Terry and I drove out to Combermere to buy it - and I bought My Russian Yesterdays as well.
Here is the log-cabin Russian-style church at the Madonna House Community.
A peaceful flower garden at Madonna House.
The Gift Shop at Madonna House
Reading Catherine's book about village life in Russia at the time of my grandparents made me appreciate my Grandfather Hugo in a new way. Life in other countries seems less strange or "quaint" when we learn more about it!
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